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Last Updated: Apr 17, 2008 - 10:14:35 AM |
TURSDAY April 17, 2008 (Foodconsumer.org) – Three studies presented at the American Academy of Neurology 60th Anniversary Annual Meeting in Chicago, April 12–19, 2008 suggested that diet and lifestyle including drinking, smoking and taking vitamin E supplements affect the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
Alzheimer's disease is a progressive, incurable and fatal disease. An estimated 4.5 million American suffer the disease whose causes remain largely unknown. The only risk factors that are officially recognized, according to National Institute on Aging, are age and faulty genes that no one can change.
The first study presented on April 14 was conducted by Ranjan Duara, MD, at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, FL and colleagues who found people who drink and or smoke heavily are more likely than others to develop Alzheimer's disease earlier.
"These results are significant because it's possible that if we can reduce or eliminate heavy smoking and drinking, we could substantially delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease for people and reduce the number of people who have Alzheimer's at any point in time," said Duara.
Duara and colleagues found a combination of heavy drinking and heavy smoking reduced the age of onset of Alzheimer's disease by six to seven years. Duara said in a statement that a delay in the onset of the disease by five years would result in a nearly 50 percent reduction in the total number of Alzheimer's cases.
The results suggested that many cases of Alzheimer's disease are preventable by simply avoiding heavy drinking and heavy smoking.
For the study, Duara and colleagues looked at 938 people aged 60 and older who were diagnosed with possible or probable Alzheimer's disease. They gathered information from family members on their drinking and smoking history and determined their status of the å4 gene variant of the APOE gene.
The variant of the gene is known to increases the risk of Alzheimer's disease and people with the faulty gene are more likely to develop the disease at an earlier age than those without.
Heavy drinking, heavy smoking and the APOE å4 variant all lowered the age of the onset of Alzheimer's disease by 4.8, 2.3 and 3 years respectively, the study found. Heavy drinking was defined as more than two drinks per day and heavy smoking was defined as smoking one pack of cigarettes or more a day.
People with all the three risk factors developed Alzheimer's disease at an average age of 68.5 years compared to 77 years for those with any.
The second study also presented at the same meeting showed that men and women with high cholesterol in their 40s were more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease, suggesting that lowering cholesterol could be another weapon to ward off the disease.
For that study, Alina Solomon, MD, at the University of Kuopio in Finland and Rachel Whitmer, Ph.D, at Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, California followed 9,752 men and women aged 40 to 45 in northern California from 1964 through 1973.
They found people with total cholesterol levels between 249 and 500 milligrams were one-and-a-half times more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than those people with less than 198 milligrams of cholesterol. And the risk of Alzheimer's disease was more than one-and-a-quarter times higher for those with total cholesterol levels of 221 to 248 milligrams.
Presented also at the same meeting, the third study by Valory Pavlik, PhD, with Baylor College of Medicine's Alzheimer's Disease and Memory Disorders Center in Houston, TX showed that Alzheimer's patients who took 1,000 IU of vitamin E twice a day were 26 percent less likely to die than those who did not.
Vitamin E can be
obtained from supplements or from a diet with some vegetables oils, nuts, green leafy vegetables
and some fortified cereals.
The amount
of the vitamin used by the Alzheimer’s patients was much bigger than the
recommended dose.
All these studies suggested that Alzheimer’s disease is not something that can't be prevented and diet and lifestyle can make a huge difference, a foodconsumer.org scientist commented.
© 2004-2008 by foodconsumer.org unless otherwise specified
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